Of fires and floods

IN THE wet season, it's flooding; in the dry season, it's bush fires and a threat to our water supply. The problem with these perennial problems is that, while we cannot control the changes in the seasons and the weather, there is a lot we can do to avoid the danger and the damage caused by these recurring agonies. Right now Trinidad and Tobago is at the height of the annual dry season and, once again, bush fires are proliferating across the country and our resevoirs are running low.

Yesterday we published the picture of a huge bush fire which blazed across the Cocorite hill at the entrance to Diego Martin. Several motorists stopped along the way to watch the conflagration as it lit up the night sky. We have no idea how the fire started, but we reported that calls to the Four Roads Fire Station proved fruitless. In driving by the station, it was observed that no tenders were there. The truth was that the Four Roads fireman had been called out earlier to another fire. Obviously, this is the busiest time of the year for our firemen. Although the Cocorite fire presented no real danger to the blocks of NHA apartments at Powder Magazine, the damage it will do is common to all hillside fires, creating a problem which the entire country should be aware of by now.

The fire will denude the hillside of its stabilising vegetation and leave the earth dry and loose. And, when the rains come, the flowing water will wash away the topsoil to cause problems below. This is how the fires of the dry season set the stage for the flooding of the wet, because in many areas of Trinidad the silt brought down by the torrents wash into the rivers and streams, flling them up and reducing their capacity to drain low lying areas. This is an almost timeless phenomenon of our country. The warnings we have issued and the appeals we have made to our people about it, over the years, have become a painful ritual.

Large tracts of land on hillsides of the Northern Range have been bared of their natural vegetation by fires caused mostly by slash and burn farmers, sometimes by hikers dropping lighted cigarettes on the parched floor of the forest and also by natural combustion in the heat of the noon-day sun. The fires that consume the bush along our highways are caused for the most part by motorists and their passengers tossing lighted cigarette butts out of the window. These are adults who should know better, but the fires continue.

The seasons come and go and they teach their lessons, that the woes the bring are largely of our own making, but we do not seem to be learning. In spite of the long history of rainy season flooding, last year was an exceptionally disastrous one as the inundating waters not only swamped large areas of the Caroni basin but also invaded places along the East West Corridor as well. What we wonder will be the result when the rains come in the next few months? We must prepare for the wet during the dry, and we can only hope that the drainage programme promised after last year's floods are being undertaken now when the weather permits. Flooding is a perennial nuisance to our lives, causing considerable loss to farmers, households and even business enterprises and seriously disrupting road communication. If we do nothing about the fires, at least we can attempt to save those vulnerable areas from the damage and agony of the flooding menace.